Trickster

The trickster figure Reynard the Fox as depicted in an 1869 children's book by Michel Rodange.

Found in the mythology, folklore, and religion of virtually all world cultures, a trickster is a figure who plays tricks or otherwise disobeys normal rules of behavior. The trickster breaks the rules of the gods or nature, sometimes maliciously, for example the Norse Loki, but usually the trickster's impact is unintentional, resulting in positive effects. Often, the rule-breaking takes the form of practical jokes or thievery. Tricksters can be cunning or foolish or both; they are often funny even when performing sacred tasks. The Native AmericanLakota sacred Heyoka (clown) is an example. His role is to play tricks and games and so doing, raises awareness and acts as an equalizer.

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Some classical examples of Tricksters in various mythologies are Mercurius in Roman mythology, Hermes in Greek mythology, Eshu in Yoruba mythology, Loki in Norse mythology, and Wakdjunga in Winnebago mythology. Today the trickster survives as a character archetype, although not necessarily a supernatural or divine figure. He or she is usually depicted as a clever, mischievous person or creature, who tries to survive the dangers and challenges of the world using trickery and deceit as a defense. Many children's fairy tales continue to use Tricksters to juxtapose perceived incongruities in the world. Some modern examples of the Trickster are the cartoon character Bugs Bunny and Charlie Chaplin's Tramp.

Cross-Cultural Mythology

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The trickster, a figure who plays tricks or disobeys rules of behavior, is an archetype appearing in many cultures

The trickster is an enduring archetype that crosses many cultures and appears in a wide variety of popular media. In many cultures, (as may be seen in Greek, Norse, or Slavic folktales, along with Native American/First Nations lore), the trickster and the culture hero are often combined. For example, Prometheus, in Greek mythology, stole fire from the gods to give to humans. In many Native American and First Nations mythologies, the coyote (Southwestern United States) or raven (Pacific Northwest, coastal British Columbia, Alaska and Russian Far East) stole fire from the gods (stars, moon, and/or sun) and are more tricksters than culture heroes. This is primarily because of other stories involving these spirits: Prometheus was a Titan, whereas the Coyote spirit and Raven spirit are usually seen as jokesters and pranksters.

While tricksters are found in various cultural traditions, there are many significant differences between the tricksters of Indigenous peoples and those in the Euro-American tradition:

"Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth".[1]

One of the most important distinctions is that "we can see in the Native American trickster an openness to life's multiplicity and paradoxes largely missing in the modern Euro-American moral tradition".[2]

Frequently the Trickster figure exhibits gender and form variability, changing gender roles. Such figures appear in Native American and First Nations mythologies, where they are said to have a two-spirit nature. Loki, the Norse trickster, also exhibits gender variability, in one case even becoming pregnant; interestingly, he shares the ability to change genders with Odin, the chief Norse deity who also possesses many characteristics of the Trickster. In the case of Loki's pregnancy, he was forced by the Gods to stop a giant from erecting a wall for them before seven days passed; he solved the problem by transforming into a mare and drawing the giant's magical horse away from its work. He returned some time later with a child he had given birth to—the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, who served as Odin's steed.

Coyote

The Coyote mythos is one of the most popular among Native American cultures. In creation myths, Coyote appears as the Creator himself; but he may at the same time be the messenger, the culture hero, the trickster, the fool. He has also the ability of the transformer: in some stories he is a handsome young man; in others he is an animal; yet others present him as a sacred power. As the culture hero, Coyote appears in various mythic traditions. His major heroic attributes are transformation, traveling, high deeds, power. He is engaged in changing the ways of rivers, standing of mountains, creating new landscapes and getting sacred things for people. Of mention is the tradition of Coyote fighting against monsters.

According to Crow tradition, Old Man Coyote impersonates the Creator, "Old Man Coyote took up a handful of mud and out of it made people".[3] His creative power is also spread onto words, "Old Man Coyote named buffalo, deer, elk, antelopes, and bear. And all these came into being." In such myths, Coyote-Creator is never mentioned as an animal; more, he can meet his animal counterpart, the coyote: they address each other as "elder brother" and "younger brother," and walk and talk together. In this way, the impersonation of Coyote as Creator offers a mythic substitute to the religious notion of the Great Spirit whose name was too dangerous and/or sacred to use apart from a special ceremony.

In Chelan myths, Coyote belongs to the animal people but he is the head of all the creatures. Yet his being 'just like the Creator' does not really mean being 'the Creator': it is not seldom that Coyote-Just-Like-Creator is subject to the Creator, Great Chief Above, who can punish him, send him away, take powers away from him, and so forth.[4]

In the Pacific Northwest tradition, Coyote is mostly mentioned as a messenger, or minor power.

According to Wasco tradition, Coyote was the hero to fight and kill Thunderbird, the killer of people. In many Wasco myths, Coyote rivals the Raven (Crow) about the same ordeal: in some stories, Multnomah Falls came to be by Coyote's efforts; in others, it is done by Raven.

More often than not Coyote is a trickster, but he is always different. In some stories, he is a noble trickster, "Coyote takes water from the Frog people… because it is not right that one people have all the water." In others, he is mean, "Coyote determined to bring harm to Duck. He took Duck's wife and children, whom he treated badly."

The Trickster's Literary Role

Modern African American literary criticism has turned the trickster figure into one example of how it is possible to overcome a system of oppression from within. For years, African American literature was discounted by the greater community of American literary criticism, while its authors were still obligated to use the language and the rhetoric of the very system that relegated African Americans and other minorities to the ostracized position of the cultural “other.” The central question became one of how to overcome this system when the only words available were created and defined by the oppressors. As Audre Lorde explained, the problem was that “the master’s tools [would] never dismantle the master’s house.”[5]

In his writings of the late 1980s, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents the concept of Signifyin(g). Wound up in this theory is the idea that the “master’s house” can be “dismantled” using his “tools” if the tools are used in a new or unconventional way. To demonstrate this process, Gates cites the interactions found in African American narrative poetry between the trickster, the Signifying Monkey, and his oppressor, the Lion.[6] According to Gates, the “Signifying Monkey” is the “New World figuration” and “functional equivalent” of the Eshu trickster figure of African Yoruba mythology.[7] The Lion functions as the authoritative figure in his classical role of “King of the Jungle.”[8] He is the one who commands the Signifying Monkey’s movements. Yet the Monkey is able to outwit the Lion continually in these narratives through his usage of figurative language. According to Gates, “[T]he Signifying Monkey is able to signify upon the Lion because the Lion does not understand the Monkey’s discourse…. The monkey speaks figuratively, in a symbolic code; the lion interprets or reads literally and suffers the consequences of his folly…” In this way, the Monkey uses the same language as the Lion, but he uses it on a level that the Lion cannot comprehend. This usually leads to the Lion’s “trounc[ing]” at the hands of a third-party, the Elephant. The net effect of all of this is “the reversal of [the Lion’s] status as the King of the Jungle.” In this way, the “master’s house” is dismantled when his own tools are turned against him by the trickster Monkey.[9]

Brer Rabbit

Following in this tradition, critics since Gates have come to assert that another popular African American folk trickster, Brer Rabbit, ("Brother Rabbit") uses clever language to perform the same kind of rebellious societal deconstruction as the Signifying Monkey. Brer Rabbit is the “creative way that the slave community responded to the oppressor’s failure to address them as human beings created in the image of God.”[10] The figurative representative of this slave community, Brer Rabbit is the hero with a “fragile body but a deceptively strong mind” that allows him to “create [his] own symbols in defiance of the perverted logic of the oppressor.”[11] By twisting language to create these symbols, Brer Rabbit not only was the “personification of the ethic of self-preservation” for the slave community, but also “an alternative response to their oppressor’s false doctrine of anthropology.”[12] Through his language of trickery, Brer Rabbit outwits his oppressors, deconstructing, in small ways, the hierarchy of subjugation to which his weak body forces him to physically conform.

Before Henry Gates, there was some precedent for the analysis of African American folk heroes as destructive agents of an oppressive hierarchical system. In the 1920s and 1930s, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound engaged in an epistolary correspondence.[13] Both writers signed the letters with pseudonyms adopted from the Uncle Remus tales; Eliot was “Possum;” Pound was “Tar Baby.” Pound and Eliot wrote in the same “African slave” dialect of the tales. Pound, writing later of the series of letters, distinguished the language from “the Queen’s English, the language of public propriety.”[13] This rebellion against proper language came as part of “collaboration” between Pound and Eliot “against the London literary establishment and the language that it used.”[13] Although Pound and Eliot were not attempting to overthrow an establishment as expansive as the one oppressing the African American slave community, they were actively trying to establish for themselves a new kind of literary freedom. In their usage of the Uncle Remus trickster figures’ names and dialects, they display an early understanding of the way in which cleverly manipulated language can dismantle a restrictive hierarchy.

African American literary criticism and folktales are not the only place in the American literary tradition that tricksters are to be found combating subjugation from within an oppressive system. In When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote, the argument is posited that the Brer Rabbit stories were derived from a mixture of African and Native American mythology, thus attributing part of the credit for the formation of the tales and wiles of Brer Rabbit to “Indian captivity narratives” and the rabbit trickster found in Cherokee mythology.[14] In arguing for a merged “African-Native American folklore,” the idea is forwarded that certain shared “cultural affinities” between African Americans and Native Americans allowed both groups “through the trickster tales… survive[d] European American cultural and political domination.”[15]

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